Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).
It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
************
This is an entry from the American Left History blog
Saturday, August 11, 2007
*ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LOOK AT LEON TROTSKY-Albert Glotzer's View
Click on title to link to the Albert Glotzer Internet Archive for samples of his writing while was in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s and later after he split from that party in the famous Shachtman-led exit in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. That was the touchstone issue for his, and later generations, and one can see in the later writing the slip-slide into the defense of "democratic" imperialism. A cautionary tale, for sure.
BOOK REVIEW
TROTSKY-MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, ALBERT GLOTZER, PROMETHEUS BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1989
THIS MONTH MARKS THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF LEON TROTSKY BY A STALINIST AGENT-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY
As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I have noted elsewhere that I believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies, or in this a case a memoir and critique (naturally-the memoir alone in this case would not sustain a book) on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Mr. Glotzer’s take on Trotsky’s legacy is a classic post World War II social democratic one driven by the effect of the ravages of American imperialism during the Cold War on the right wing of that international political tendency. The post war period was not kind to those who fell away from the politics that sparked their communist youth, but more on that at another time.
Despite our extreme politic differences Mr. Glotzer’s reminiscences of how he became a communist are welcome. I am always fascinated by how those who came to political maturity a couple of generations before me and who are the real living links to the Russian Revolution felt about that event. Moreover, Mr. Glotzer is no mere chronicler of Trotsky’s life. During the 1930’s before the political temperature in the American left intellectual milieu got too hot for some of them Mr. Glotzer was part of the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement and was a key lieutenant, factional operative and personal friend of a central founder- one Max Shachtman. That these two, along with another “Young Turk” one Martin Abern, spent as much time plotting for organizational control of the movement against the wily ‘bureaucratic’ old timer and founder James P. Cannon during that time as in constructive political work is a separate issue. Needless to say only a few cryptic references to that experience surface in this work- a very selective memoir, as is usually the case. For more on that political struggle read Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and make up your own mind.
As always the critique of Trotsky, or more correctly, Bolshevism is centered on the question of the organizational principles of that party. That is democratic- centralism or as the critics would have it bureaucratic-centralism-long on the bureaucratic, short on the democratic. Trotsky is seen here to have escaped that bad practice until he linked up with the Bolsheviks in 1917. This is his 'original sin' in the eyes of liberals and social democrats like Glotzer. The reduction of an organizational principle of a political party to the decisive reason for the degeneration of a revolution defies belief.
The model for all European social democratic parties, including both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century was the German party. One does not have to read to far into the history of that party to know that even without state power to buttress its organizational practice that party was as bureaucratically run as any Stalinist party cell. The real question then is not the principle of democratic centralism but the question of a ‘vanguard party’ versus a ‘party of the whole class’. In the end that was what the dispute in the Russian social democracy turned on. And later on the international movement, as well. History has demonstrated, if it has demonstrated anything on this question, that a ‘party of the whole class’ with its implication of inclusiveness toward socially backward workers can never take state power, if that was the idea of those who argued for this type of party in the first place. All of the above said, the question of bureaucracy in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism is one that has, in the light of the history of Stalinism, has to be taken as a real question. There are no a priori guarantees on the bumpy road to socialism but that is hardly the decisive question for now.
The rest of Glotzer’s critique is a more or less quick gloss on his politics and a rather annoying gloating over what proved to be the incorrectness of some of Trotsky’s predictions. The central argument Glotzer presents here is that capitalism rather than being in its death throes as Trotsky (and before him, Lenin) suggested still had, and has, a life and is not ready to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, those social democrats, like Glotzer, did more than their fair share of ideological work of behalf of preserving the imperialist status quo. Perhaps he would have been better off if he had ended his memoirs in his Communist youth in the 1930’s when he helped to try to create an international Trotskyist youth movement -that is the Glotzer who interests me. The rest I have heard a million times before.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread: The Development of Trotskyism over 40 Years, Fortress Books, London 1989, pp.85, £6.95
A book that sets out to present in handy form the contributions of one of the foremost thinkers of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain can only be welcomed, did it but restrict itself to that aim. Unfortunately, that is not the case with this selection, which in a number of places sets out to tinker with the historical record in the interests of promoting a personality cult.
Readers of our Reviews section will recall (Vol.1, no.4, p.44) that in a previous review of a book from the same publisher I took exception to the remark that in 1938 Ted Grant was already the “Theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain”. I made the point that in no way was this the case, and that even in the WIL Ralph Lee considerably overshadowed him, although he did not even deserve a mention in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s account.
This book’s compilers were in considerable difficulties in finding any writings signed by Ted Grant that could justify this statement at all that dated from 1938, let alone earlier, where his name does not appear alone on a single document. The result of a no doubt dedicated search to prove the contrary came up with the preface to the WIL version of Trotsky’s The Lessons of Spain – The Last Warning, which on page 1 is described as “written jointly by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee”, and less modestly in the caption of the illustration on page 59 as “Ted Grant’s introduction”. The truth is, as any comrade in the WIL at the time in London is able to affirm, that it was the work of Lee himself, with next to no input by Grant at all. The initials appended to the text, those of J.R. Strachan, were in fact those of Jock Haston's wife. Devotees of stylistic analysis – which can now be done by computer – will no doubt derive great amusement from the demonstration that the preface bears none of the marks of Ted Grant’s easily recognisable style at all. The attempt to predate Grant’s leadership qualities to his sojourn in South Africa is even more laughable, when on page vii of the preface he is credited along with Lee and Purdy with founding “the Workers International League in South Africa”, the name of the new group that Lee founded when he returned to that country during the Second World War. Even Lee’s rôle in founding the English group of that name is concealed by the statement (p.viii) that he came to Britain in 1938, whereas the minutes of the Conference of the Harber Group show clearly that he was in Britain a year earlier. Grant’s journey, on the other hand, is placed a year earlier than it was in order to lend credence to his alleged leading theoretical role at this early date. This is historically light-fingered, to say the least.
As with the versions of Stalin’s and Lenin’s Selected Works, names have simply dropped out of history. Whereas in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s book the main victim of this treatment was Ralph Lee, in this collection it is Roy Tearse, Jock Haston and Bill Hunter who have slipped out of the record, names to be found in neither text nor index.
Thus on page ix of the preface we are told that “only Ted Grant” was able to come to terms with the development of the new situation in the post-war world, and on page 82 that the RCP did this “under the theoretical guidance of Ted Grant especially”. Nowhere are we informed that the documents pointing out a new situation written by Goldman and Morrow circulated freely inside the WIL and the RCP before Grant recognised what was valid in them, or that as far as the economic forecast was concerned Tearse realised the fallacy of the International Secretariat’s position before Grant did. And as for foreseeing the new situation in Europe before all others, that too is myth, as a simple consultation of the article written by Ted Grant entitled The Coming German Revolution in the October 1944 issue of Workers International News shows all too plainly – an article mysteriously absent from this collection. The contributions of Tony Cliff and Jock Haston to this discussion are not cited in the description given in this book on pp.371-3, and most disgracefully of all the section on Eastern Europe on pp.187-91 does not even hint at the fact that it was Haston who began the discussion about Russia and Eastern Europe, both in Socialist Appeal and in the internal bulletin of the RCP. We are simply told that “it was Ted Grant, as the leading theoretician of the RCP, who worked out a correct position” (p.188).
Even more contemptible is the selection or editing of texts to give a totally false picture or exonerate the author from the results of his mistaken policies. Although we are told that “there are none of the writings or speeches of Ted Grant that the author would not now be prepared to reissue and debate” (p.xiv) the controversy about Chauvinism and Revolutionary Defeatism restricts itself to Grant’s polemic against the RSL in 1943, carefully avoiding the document Grant wrote along with Healy for the WIL’s internal bulletin two years earlier, which showed himself and Healy to be on the right wing of the movement as against the position argued by Jock Haston and Sam Levy. Although we are told that “he main reason why original articles and documents have been cut is an attempt to concentrate as much as possible in a single volume, without vulgarising or simplifying the theoretical constructions” (p.xv), and that the reason that the cuts are not indicated in the text has “no ulterior motive”, this is demonstrably not the case. The version of Preparing for Power that is served up has removed from it the entire polemic against the tactic of entry work into the Labour Party, and in particular the passage with the remark that “such a perspective is farcical and can only serve as a cloak for complete inactivity”. The cuts amount to well over a thousand words, and their significance can easily be gauged.
When in the interview with Collins in 1936 Trotsky advised his British supporters to join the Labour Party, he based himself on the perspective of a rising tide of industrial militancy and its effects upon radicalising the Labour Party and making its supporters receptive to revolutionary ideas. Naturally the coming of war slowed down the process, but 1944 showed the largest number of days lost in strikes of any year back to 1926. The result of this was soon shown by the two most radical Labour Party conferences that have ever met, as a simple consultation of their minutes demonstrates clearly. And in 1945 people who had no previous connection with the party, or even with the working class at all, were able to be adopted as candidates and found themselves almost immediately in parliament. The main responsibility for the British Trotskyists not being there, otherwise engaged in attempting to create a party by linear recruiting, lies squarely on the shoulders of Haston ... and Grant, “especially” (p.82). By these cuts Grant escapes his responsibility for the loss of the historical opportunities of a generation, opportunities prepared and foreseen for the movement by Leon Trotsky himself. The final break-up of the RCP is laid, not at Grant’s door, but “in large measure due to bureaucratic interference and outright manoeuvres by the leadership of the Fourth International” (p.ix), to which is added the ingenuous remark that “at that point [1949] Ted Grant and the British Marxists turned their backs on this international organisation” (p.83).
Add to this catalogue of downright falsification a crop of random stupid errors (e.g. that the authors of the Three Theses had spent most of the war years in exile in Britain, p.84), and we have a very sorry production indeed. This is a shame, because Ted Grant’s theoretical record speaks up as well as anybody’s during the period, even if it has done no more than spin round on the same turntable since 1949. It is, in general, unwise to reproduce documents in extracts, and far better to present fewer key statements intact. But even worse is not to indicate the presence of cuts in the text at all, which makes this collection useless for critical purposes. Anybody reminded of the fate of certain Russian Marxist writings might search for a similar explanation, in the self-censoring activities of a swollen and parasitic bureaucracy of full-time officials.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread: The Development of Trotskyism over 40 Years, Fortress Books, London 1989, pp.85, £6.95
A book that sets out to present in handy form the contributions of one of the foremost thinkers of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain can only be welcomed, did it but restrict itself to that aim. Unfortunately, that is not the case with this selection, which in a number of places sets out to tinker with the historical record in the interests of promoting a personality cult.
Readers of our Reviews section will recall (Vol.1, no.4, p.44) that in a previous review of a book from the same publisher I took exception to the remark that in 1938 Ted Grant was already the “Theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain”. I made the point that in no way was this the case, and that even in the WIL Ralph Lee considerably overshadowed him, although he did not even deserve a mention in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s account.
This book’s compilers were in considerable difficulties in finding any writings signed by Ted Grant that could justify this statement at all that dated from 1938, let alone earlier, where his name does not appear alone on a single document. The result of a no doubt dedicated search to prove the contrary came up with the preface to the WIL version of Trotsky’s The Lessons of Spain – The Last Warning, which on page 1 is described as “written jointly by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee”, and less modestly in the caption of the illustration on page 59 as “Ted Grant’s introduction”. The truth is, as any comrade in the WIL at the time in London is able to affirm, that it was the work of Lee himself, with next to no input by Grant at all. The initials appended to the text, those of J.R. Strachan, were in fact those of Jock Haston's wife. Devotees of stylistic analysis – which can now be done by computer – will no doubt derive great amusement from the demonstration that the preface bears none of the marks of Ted Grant’s easily recognisable style at all. The attempt to predate Grant’s leadership qualities to his sojourn in South Africa is even more laughable, when on page vii of the preface he is credited along with Lee and Purdy with founding “the Workers International League in South Africa”, the name of the new group that Lee founded when he returned to that country during the Second World War. Even Lee’s rôle in founding the English group of that name is concealed by the statement (p.viii) that he came to Britain in 1938, whereas the minutes of the Conference of the Harber Group show clearly that he was in Britain a year earlier. Grant’s journey, on the other hand, is placed a year earlier than it was in order to lend credence to his alleged leading theoretical role at this early date. This is historically light-fingered, to say the least.
As with the versions of Stalin’s and Lenin’s Selected Works, names have simply dropped out of history. Whereas in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s book the main victim of this treatment was Ralph Lee, in this collection it is Roy Tearse, Jock Haston and Bill Hunter who have slipped out of the record, names to be found in neither text nor index.
Thus on page ix of the preface we are told that “only Ted Grant” was able to come to terms with the development of the new situation in the post-war world, and on page 82 that the RCP did this “under the theoretical guidance of Ted Grant especially”. Nowhere are we informed that the documents pointing out a new situation written by Goldman and Morrow circulated freely inside the WIL and the RCP before Grant recognised what was valid in them, or that as far as the economic forecast was concerned Tearse realised the fallacy of the International Secretariat’s position before Grant did. And as for foreseeing the new situation in Europe before all others, that too is myth, as a simple consultation of the article written by Ted Grant entitled The Coming German Revolution in the October 1944 issue of Workers International News shows all too plainly – an article mysteriously absent from this collection. The contributions of Tony Cliff and Jock Haston to this discussion are not cited in the description given in this book on pp.371-3, and most disgracefully of all the section on Eastern Europe on pp.187-91 does not even hint at the fact that it was Haston who began the discussion about Russia and Eastern Europe, both in Socialist Appeal and in the internal bulletin of the RCP. We are simply told that “it was Ted Grant, as the leading theoretician of the RCP, who worked out a correct position” (p.188).
Even more contemptible is the selection or editing of texts to give a totally false picture or exonerate the author from the results of his mistaken policies. Although we are told that “there are none of the writings or speeches of Ted Grant that the author would not now be prepared to reissue and debate” (p.xiv) the controversy about Chauvinism and Revolutionary Defeatism restricts itself to Grant’s polemic against the RSL in 1943, carefully avoiding the document Grant wrote along with Healy for the WIL’s internal bulletin two years earlier, which showed himself and Healy to be on the right wing of the movement as against the position argued by Jock Haston and Sam Levy. Although we are told that “he main reason why original articles and documents have been cut is an attempt to concentrate as much as possible in a single volume, without vulgarising or simplifying the theoretical constructions” (p.xv), and that the reason that the cuts are not indicated in the text has “no ulterior motive”, this is demonstrably not the case. The version of Preparing for Power that is served up has removed from it the entire polemic against the tactic of entry work into the Labour Party, and in particular the passage with the remark that “such a perspective is farcical and can only serve as a cloak for complete inactivity”. The cuts amount to well over a thousand words, and their significance can easily be gauged.
When in the interview with Collins in 1936 Trotsky advised his British supporters to join the Labour Party, he based himself on the perspective of a rising tide of industrial militancy and its effects upon radicalising the Labour Party and making its supporters receptive to revolutionary ideas. Naturally the coming of war slowed down the process, but 1944 showed the largest number of days lost in strikes of any year back to 1926. The result of this was soon shown by the two most radical Labour Party conferences that have ever met, as a simple consultation of their minutes demonstrates clearly. And in 1945 people who had no previous connection with the party, or even with the working class at all, were able to be adopted as candidates and found themselves almost immediately in parliament. The main responsibility for the British Trotskyists not being there, otherwise engaged in attempting to create a party by linear recruiting, lies squarely on the shoulders of Haston ... and Grant, “especially” (p.82). By these cuts Grant escapes his responsibility for the loss of the historical opportunities of a generation, opportunities prepared and foreseen for the movement by Leon Trotsky himself. The final break-up of the RCP is laid, not at Grant’s door, but “in large measure due to bureaucratic interference and outright manoeuvres by the leadership of the Fourth International” (p.ix), to which is added the ingenuous remark that “at that point [1949] Ted Grant and the British Marxists turned their backs on this international organisation” (p.83).
Add to this catalogue of downright falsification a crop of random stupid errors (e.g. that the authors of the Three Theses had spent most of the war years in exile in Britain, p.84), and we have a very sorry production indeed. This is a shame, because Ted Grant’s theoretical record speaks up as well as anybody’s during the period, even if it has done no more than spin round on the same turntable since 1949. It is, in general, unwise to reproduce documents in extracts, and far better to present fewer key statements intact. But even worse is not to indicate the presence of cuts in the text at all, which makes this collection useless for critical purposes. Anybody reminded of the fate of certain Russian Marxist writings might search for a similar explanation, in the self-censoring activities of a swollen and parasitic bureaucracy of full-time officials.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, Gower, Aldershot 1987, pp.216, £17.50
The Mensheviks, Russia’s moderate Marxists, were completely marginalised in the summer of 1917, when the course of history found itself at odds with their strategy of building a parliamentary Socialist opposition within a capitalist society. Faced with the choice of a military coup or the transfer of power to the workers’ councils, the Bolsheviks led a successful bid for state power.
What could have been a useful study of reformism in a revolutionary period is spoiled by Broido’s preoccupation with the trials and tribulations suffered by the Mensheviks during the first few years of the Soviet republic. Half the book is a depressing catalogue of arrests, jailings and exiles. Things aren't helped by Broido blaming the stern features of the young Soviet republic, not on the prevailing objective conditions, but on the original sin of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
The Russian masses rallied to the Bolsheviks during a period of dramatic upsurge. In the retreat that followed with the deprivation and destruction of the civil war of 1918-20, the old parties, the Mensheviks and the populist Social Revolutionaries, regained some support. This strained the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasantry. Knowing that they were the only alternative to capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention, the Bolsheviks held on, awaiting the European revolutions upon which all depended, and refused to countenance any challenge to their rule.
The treatment meted out to the Mensheviks was often gratuitously harsh, but the Bolsheviks’ mistrust of them was understandable. Hadn’t they supported the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917, hadn’t some leading Mensheviks colluded in the vile slandering of Lenin as an agent of the Kaiser? Had not the Menshevik government in Georgia persecuted the revolutionaries and openly stated that they preferred the imperialists of the west to the ‘fanatics’ of the east? None of this could have endeared the Mensheviks to those who had led the revolution and were intent on defending it.
The Mensheviks were finally suppressed in the early 1920s as the Soviet government reintroduced limited capitalist measures under the New Economic Policy. Despite, or rather because of, the similarities between the NEP and the Mensheviks’ economic programme, the Bolsheviks could no longer chance any political opposition. Yet this final clampdown had a cruelly ironic sequel. The European revolutions failed, the gulf between the masses and the Bolsheviks continued to deepen, arid conservative and bureaucratic trends emerged within the ruling party. Within a few years the degeneration was such that the party’s revolutionary wing, the Left Opposition, was itself marginalised, harassed, jailed and exiled like the Mensheviks, only on a far worse scale.
The Mensheviks were not consigned to the dustbin of history (to use Trotsky’s apt term) because of Bolshevik mendacity. Slaves to a dogmatic Marxism which held that the revolution of February 1917 heralded a long period of capitalist development with all the trappings of bourgeois democracy, they foundered in the storms of that year. They had been rendered obsolete. As we know, Bolshevism, beleaguered and isolated, succumbed soon after. But Bolshevism remains of great significance to this day whereas Menshevism is but of historical interest. However, Broido’s book is of little value for those who wish to learn about the Mensheviks and their place in history.
Paul Flewers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, Gower, Aldershot 1987, pp.216, £17.50
The Mensheviks, Russia’s moderate Marxists, were completely marginalised in the summer of 1917, when the course of history found itself at odds with their strategy of building a parliamentary Socialist opposition within a capitalist society. Faced with the choice of a military coup or the transfer of power to the workers’ councils, the Bolsheviks led a successful bid for state power.
What could have been a useful study of reformism in a revolutionary period is spoiled by Broido’s preoccupation with the trials and tribulations suffered by the Mensheviks during the first few years of the Soviet republic. Half the book is a depressing catalogue of arrests, jailings and exiles. Things aren't helped by Broido blaming the stern features of the young Soviet republic, not on the prevailing objective conditions, but on the original sin of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
The Russian masses rallied to the Bolsheviks during a period of dramatic upsurge. In the retreat that followed with the deprivation and destruction of the civil war of 1918-20, the old parties, the Mensheviks and the populist Social Revolutionaries, regained some support. This strained the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasantry. Knowing that they were the only alternative to capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention, the Bolsheviks held on, awaiting the European revolutions upon which all depended, and refused to countenance any challenge to their rule.
The treatment meted out to the Mensheviks was often gratuitously harsh, but the Bolsheviks’ mistrust of them was understandable. Hadn’t they supported the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917, hadn’t some leading Mensheviks colluded in the vile slandering of Lenin as an agent of the Kaiser? Had not the Menshevik government in Georgia persecuted the revolutionaries and openly stated that they preferred the imperialists of the west to the ‘fanatics’ of the east? None of this could have endeared the Mensheviks to those who had led the revolution and were intent on defending it.
The Mensheviks were finally suppressed in the early 1920s as the Soviet government reintroduced limited capitalist measures under the New Economic Policy. Despite, or rather because of, the similarities between the NEP and the Mensheviks’ economic programme, the Bolsheviks could no longer chance any political opposition. Yet this final clampdown had a cruelly ironic sequel. The European revolutions failed, the gulf between the masses and the Bolsheviks continued to deepen, arid conservative and bureaucratic trends emerged within the ruling party. Within a few years the degeneration was such that the party’s revolutionary wing, the Left Opposition, was itself marginalised, harassed, jailed and exiled like the Mensheviks, only on a far worse scale.
The Mensheviks were not consigned to the dustbin of history (to use Trotsky’s apt term) because of Bolshevik mendacity. Slaves to a dogmatic Marxism which held that the revolution of February 1917 heralded a long period of capitalist development with all the trappings of bourgeois democracy, they foundered in the storms of that year. They had been rendered obsolete. As we know, Bolshevism, beleaguered and isolated, succumbed soon after. But Bolshevism remains of great significance to this day whereas Menshevism is but of historical interest. However, Broido’s book is of little value for those who wish to learn about the Mensheviks and their place in history.
Paul Flewers
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, MacMillan, Basingstoke 1988, pp.239, £29.50.
The October Revolution drew on an international scale towards Bolshevism a wide range of radical groups and individuals. Despite their initial attraction to Bolshevism, some of them either adopted or continued with an orientation that was virulently hostile to working within bourgeois parliaments and reformist trade unions, and rejected any form of joint work with reformist parties. This book concerns itself with the groups of such a persuasion in Britain in the period of 1917 to 1945.
Along with organisations of a similar outlook, the Workers Socialist Federation, of which Sylvia Pankhurst was a leader, formed in 1920 the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) prior to the formation of the official CP, and attempted to win the Communist movement internationally to an anti-parliamentary strategy. Expelled from the Third International along with other such groups in various countries, it aligned itself with the Communist Workers International in 1921, only to fade away in the mid-1920s. Other anti-parliamentary groups, including one around the colourful Glasgow-based Anarchist Guy Aldred, formed in 1921 the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. This group lasted through the Second World War, which it actively opposed, although not without fissures, Aldred splitting off in 1933 to form the United Socialist Movement.
Having left the Third International, Pankhurst’s group rapidly reconsidered its previously positive attitude towards Bolshevism. The New Economic Policy, of 1921 confirmed its opinion that the Soviet Union was now in fact capitalist with a new, ‘Communist’ ruling class. The Communists’ United Front tactic was seen as a rank capitulation to reformism. Grave doubts arose over Leninist norms of organisation. Aldred, whilst always critical of the Third International’s tactics, waited until the mid-1920s before considering the Soviet Union to be capitalist, and then he dabbled with Trotsky’s degenerated workers’ state theory in 1934.
Despite his sympathy towards the book’s subject, Shipway does not fail to draw attention to the more questionable aspects of the movement. During the first months of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 both the APCF and the USM made no criticisms of the Republican government. Shipway criticises Aldred for opening the pages of his journal during the Second World War to priests, parliamentary pacifists and the highly dubious Duke of Bedford, yet he approves of the anti-parliamentarians’ pacifist opposition to the war. He points to their failure to carry out a theoretical re-evaluation of the October Revolution – did it merely usher in capitalism? – yet considers this omission as justifiable. He does not comment on the APCF’s preference for Rosa Luxemburg’s crude under-consumptionist crisis theory as against the superior concepts expressed by Council Communist Paul Mattick.
One cannot judge the political validity of anti-parliamentary Communism by its failure as a movement; the entire history of Socialism appears to be a sad array of failures both heroic and ignoble. But the refusal of the anti-parliamentarians to work within trade unions or to countenance United Front work helped to keep the bulk of the working class under the influence of reformism. The problem was not the tactics of the Third International, but their application. Yet however much the anti-parliamentarian Communists were wrong, the main problem with the left in Britain has generally been opportunism, not ultra-leftism. Those who have touted left-speaking union bureaucrats or tried to apply United Front tactics regardless of their relevance to the situation should think twice before passing judgement.
Apart from its absurdly high price, the main problem with this book is the absence of oral evidence. Admittedly there can't be many survivors around, yet some interviews would have given an idea of the ‘feel’ of the movement. All the same, Anti-Parliamentary Communism sheds a welcome light upon a little-known corner of the labour movement in Britain.
Paul Flewers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, MacMillan, Basingstoke 1988, pp.239, £29.50.
The October Revolution drew on an international scale towards Bolshevism a wide range of radical groups and individuals. Despite their initial attraction to Bolshevism, some of them either adopted or continued with an orientation that was virulently hostile to working within bourgeois parliaments and reformist trade unions, and rejected any form of joint work with reformist parties. This book concerns itself with the groups of such a persuasion in Britain in the period of 1917 to 1945.
Along with organisations of a similar outlook, the Workers Socialist Federation, of which Sylvia Pankhurst was a leader, formed in 1920 the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) prior to the formation of the official CP, and attempted to win the Communist movement internationally to an anti-parliamentary strategy. Expelled from the Third International along with other such groups in various countries, it aligned itself with the Communist Workers International in 1921, only to fade away in the mid-1920s. Other anti-parliamentary groups, including one around the colourful Glasgow-based Anarchist Guy Aldred, formed in 1921 the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. This group lasted through the Second World War, which it actively opposed, although not without fissures, Aldred splitting off in 1933 to form the United Socialist Movement.
Having left the Third International, Pankhurst’s group rapidly reconsidered its previously positive attitude towards Bolshevism. The New Economic Policy, of 1921 confirmed its opinion that the Soviet Union was now in fact capitalist with a new, ‘Communist’ ruling class. The Communists’ United Front tactic was seen as a rank capitulation to reformism. Grave doubts arose over Leninist norms of organisation. Aldred, whilst always critical of the Third International’s tactics, waited until the mid-1920s before considering the Soviet Union to be capitalist, and then he dabbled with Trotsky’s degenerated workers’ state theory in 1934.
Despite his sympathy towards the book’s subject, Shipway does not fail to draw attention to the more questionable aspects of the movement. During the first months of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 both the APCF and the USM made no criticisms of the Republican government. Shipway criticises Aldred for opening the pages of his journal during the Second World War to priests, parliamentary pacifists and the highly dubious Duke of Bedford, yet he approves of the anti-parliamentarians’ pacifist opposition to the war. He points to their failure to carry out a theoretical re-evaluation of the October Revolution – did it merely usher in capitalism? – yet considers this omission as justifiable. He does not comment on the APCF’s preference for Rosa Luxemburg’s crude under-consumptionist crisis theory as against the superior concepts expressed by Council Communist Paul Mattick.
One cannot judge the political validity of anti-parliamentary Communism by its failure as a movement; the entire history of Socialism appears to be a sad array of failures both heroic and ignoble. But the refusal of the anti-parliamentarians to work within trade unions or to countenance United Front work helped to keep the bulk of the working class under the influence of reformism. The problem was not the tactics of the Third International, but their application. Yet however much the anti-parliamentarian Communists were wrong, the main problem with the left in Britain has generally been opportunism, not ultra-leftism. Those who have touted left-speaking union bureaucrats or tried to apply United Front tactics regardless of their relevance to the situation should think twice before passing judgement.
Apart from its absurdly high price, the main problem with this book is the absence of oral evidence. Admittedly there can't be many survivors around, yet some interviews would have given an idea of the ‘feel’ of the movement. All the same, Anti-Parliamentary Communism sheds a welcome light upon a little-known corner of the labour movement in Britain.
Paul Flewers
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
Monday, October 11, 2010
***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again, No More"
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of the McGarrigles performing Hard Times Come Again, No More.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Stephen Foster's original lyrics:[4]
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.
Chorus:
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Stephen Foster's original lyrics:[4]
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.
Chorus:
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Cotton Blue Blues"
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Old man Sargent sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
He'd take the nickels off a dead man's eyes,
To buy a Coca-cola and a Pomo Pie.
cho: I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
Lordy, lordy, spoolin's hard,
You know and I know, I don't have to tell:
Work for Tom Watson, got to work like hell.
I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
( Repeat after each verse)
When I die, don't bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spoolroom wall.
Place a knotter in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
When I die, don't bury me deep,
Bury me down on 600 Street,
Place a bobbin in each hand,
So I can dolph in the Promised Land,
**********
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Old man Sargent sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
He'd take the nickels off a dead man's eyes,
To buy a Coca-cola and a Pomo Pie.
cho: I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
Lordy, lordy, spoolin's hard,
You know and I know, I don't have to tell:
Work for Tom Watson, got to work like hell.
I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
( Repeat after each verse)
When I die, don't bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spoolroom wall.
Place a knotter in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
When I die, don't bury me deep,
Bury me down on 600 Street,
Place a bobbin in each hand,
So I can dolph in the Promised Land,
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Remembering The Old Songs:THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Remembering The Old Songs:
THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, November 2006)
Other parts of the world may have nomadic groups, such as gypsies, but the lone homeless tramp belongs to the large open spaces. The rise of the railroads in the 19th century brought new efficiency to migrancy. Anyone with the agility and courage to catch a slow-moving freight car could go anywhere in America without a ticket. If you had charm, you could also cadge a meal from a sympathetic homeowner without even having to chop any wood.
There are lone wanderers, people who can't abide others and who can't sit still, but most of the transients would have preferred to have a home. All kinds of misfortunes could happen to even normal men (women seldom rode the rails) in an era without social safety nets. Unemployment was an important cause, as were financial ruin, injury or sickness, and family difficulties (e.g., young runaways). But the trains also carried alcoholics and criminals on the run, so ordinary people, already afraid of strangers, feared tramps. In response, some who understood the varied causes for migrancy published songs portraying tramps in a positive light. One such broadside, published in the 1880s (reprinted in Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong), is a high-minded but ponderous 3rd-person plea that includes a chorus:
So if you meet a tramp that bears misfortune's stamp,
If he is worthy of your aid, why freely give.
Give him a hearty grip, wish him luck upon his trip,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live.
At some time during the next 45 years, someone re-wrote (and greatly improved) this song, using mostly new words except for the last line of the chorus. The new version, changed to first person, added details about a railroad injury and the need to sing for spare change. It was first recorded by Walter Morris in 1926, although I learned it from Ernest Stoneman's 1927 cover. Later, when the Great Depression hit, almost everyone was on the move searching for work, and the trains were overwhelmed with migrants. By that time, no one could afford to buy records pleading for help to the tramps.
We still have bums, but you don't hear much about tramps any more, and, as far as the media is concerned, to be a hobo is a hobby. Rail yards are guarded, so freight trains are harder to catch. Drivers are afraid to pick up hitchhikers and there's no place to stow away on an airplane. No wonder our homeless are now sedentary, standing with cardboard signs asking for money but not transportation. It's a bad sign for our future if there's no hope for a ride to a better place.
[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)]
Complete Lyrics:
1. I'm a poor old railroad man,
Once a healthy section hand;
And old age is slowly creeping on the way.
Now hard times is coming on
And my last gold dollar is gone,
And this song is what I made to sing and play.
CHORUS:
Now you ofttimes see the stamp
Of a poor unfortunate tramp;
He has no home and has no place to fill.
As you see him pass along
And he sings his little song,
Please remember that the poor tramp has to live.
2. My health broke down out on the track,
With the heavy loads upon my back;
Now I have to make my way the best I can.
We never know when we are young
What may be our future doom.
These words is from a broke-down section hand. CHO.
3. Yes, my health is broken down
And I tramp from town to town;
Sing and play, take whatever you may give.
While I try to play and sing,
Just divide your little change,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live. CHO.
**********
Remembering The Old Songs:
THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, November 2006)
Other parts of the world may have nomadic groups, such as gypsies, but the lone homeless tramp belongs to the large open spaces. The rise of the railroads in the 19th century brought new efficiency to migrancy. Anyone with the agility and courage to catch a slow-moving freight car could go anywhere in America without a ticket. If you had charm, you could also cadge a meal from a sympathetic homeowner without even having to chop any wood.
There are lone wanderers, people who can't abide others and who can't sit still, but most of the transients would have preferred to have a home. All kinds of misfortunes could happen to even normal men (women seldom rode the rails) in an era without social safety nets. Unemployment was an important cause, as were financial ruin, injury or sickness, and family difficulties (e.g., young runaways). But the trains also carried alcoholics and criminals on the run, so ordinary people, already afraid of strangers, feared tramps. In response, some who understood the varied causes for migrancy published songs portraying tramps in a positive light. One such broadside, published in the 1880s (reprinted in Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong), is a high-minded but ponderous 3rd-person plea that includes a chorus:
So if you meet a tramp that bears misfortune's stamp,
If he is worthy of your aid, why freely give.
Give him a hearty grip, wish him luck upon his trip,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live.
At some time during the next 45 years, someone re-wrote (and greatly improved) this song, using mostly new words except for the last line of the chorus. The new version, changed to first person, added details about a railroad injury and the need to sing for spare change. It was first recorded by Walter Morris in 1926, although I learned it from Ernest Stoneman's 1927 cover. Later, when the Great Depression hit, almost everyone was on the move searching for work, and the trains were overwhelmed with migrants. By that time, no one could afford to buy records pleading for help to the tramps.
We still have bums, but you don't hear much about tramps any more, and, as far as the media is concerned, to be a hobo is a hobby. Rail yards are guarded, so freight trains are harder to catch. Drivers are afraid to pick up hitchhikers and there's no place to stow away on an airplane. No wonder our homeless are now sedentary, standing with cardboard signs asking for money but not transportation. It's a bad sign for our future if there's no hope for a ride to a better place.
[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)]
Complete Lyrics:
1. I'm a poor old railroad man,
Once a healthy section hand;
And old age is slowly creeping on the way.
Now hard times is coming on
And my last gold dollar is gone,
And this song is what I made to sing and play.
CHORUS:
Now you ofttimes see the stamp
Of a poor unfortunate tramp;
He has no home and has no place to fill.
As you see him pass along
And he sings his little song,
Please remember that the poor tramp has to live.
2. My health broke down out on the track,
With the heavy loads upon my back;
Now I have to make my way the best I can.
We never know when we are young
What may be our future doom.
These words is from a broke-down section hand. CHO.
3. Yes, my health is broken down
And I tramp from town to town;
Sing and play, take whatever you may give.
While I try to play and sing,
Just divide your little change,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live. CHO.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-COTTON MILL COLIC-(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***********
COTTON MILL COLIC
(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s)
McCarn wrote this song in 1926. Released on record in August 1930, it was soon being sung by striking Piedmont mill workers. It was collected by Alan Lomax in 1939 and appeared in FOLKSONGS OF NORTH AMERICA and OUR SINGING COUNTRY. It's recording history is long and includes versions by Lester Pete Bivins (Decca), the Blue Sky Boys (Capitol) and both Pete & Mike Seeger (Folkways). Probably it is McCarn's best composition; revealing with wry humour the often grim situation of the millhand unable to get straight financially.
Mike Paris, liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505. 1970s.
Recorded May 19, 1930, Memphis, TN (Vi 40274).
Lyrics as reprinted in liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505, 1970s.
When you buy clothes on easy terms,
Collectors treat you like measly worms.
One dollar down, then Lord knows,
If you can't make a payment, they'll take your clothes.
When you go to bed you can't sleep,
You owe so much at the end of the week.
No use to colic, they're all that way,
Pecking at your door till they get your pay.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
When you go to work you work like the devil,
At the end of the week you're not on the level.
Payday comes, you pay your rent,
When you get through you've notgot a cent
To buy fat-back meat, pinto beans,
Now and then you get turnip greens.
No use to colic, we're all that way,
Can't get the money to move away.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
Twelve dollars a week is all we get,
How in the heck can we live on that?
I've got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.
Patches on my britches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave, my wife got fat.
No use to colic, everyday at noon,
The kids get to crying in a different tune.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
They run a few days and then they stand,
Just to keep down the working man.
We can't make it, we never will,
As long as we stay at a lousy mill.
The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer,
If you don't starve, I'm a son of a gun.
No use to colic, no use to rave,
We'll never rest till we're in our grave.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
***********
COTTON MILL COLIC
(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s)
McCarn wrote this song in 1926. Released on record in August 1930, it was soon being sung by striking Piedmont mill workers. It was collected by Alan Lomax in 1939 and appeared in FOLKSONGS OF NORTH AMERICA and OUR SINGING COUNTRY. It's recording history is long and includes versions by Lester Pete Bivins (Decca), the Blue Sky Boys (Capitol) and both Pete & Mike Seeger (Folkways). Probably it is McCarn's best composition; revealing with wry humour the often grim situation of the millhand unable to get straight financially.
Mike Paris, liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505. 1970s.
Recorded May 19, 1930, Memphis, TN (Vi 40274).
Lyrics as reprinted in liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505, 1970s.
When you buy clothes on easy terms,
Collectors treat you like measly worms.
One dollar down, then Lord knows,
If you can't make a payment, they'll take your clothes.
When you go to bed you can't sleep,
You owe so much at the end of the week.
No use to colic, they're all that way,
Pecking at your door till they get your pay.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
When you go to work you work like the devil,
At the end of the week you're not on the level.
Payday comes, you pay your rent,
When you get through you've notgot a cent
To buy fat-back meat, pinto beans,
Now and then you get turnip greens.
No use to colic, we're all that way,
Can't get the money to move away.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
Twelve dollars a week is all we get,
How in the heck can we live on that?
I've got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.
Patches on my britches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave, my wife got fat.
No use to colic, everyday at noon,
The kids get to crying in a different tune.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
They run a few days and then they stand,
Just to keep down the working man.
We can't make it, we never will,
As long as we stay at a lousy mill.
The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer,
If you don't starve, I'm a son of a gun.
No use to colic, no use to rave,
We'll never rest till we're in our grave.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Blue Harvest Blues"-Mississippi John Hurt
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Blue Harvest Blues
Standing on the mountain : far as I can see
Dark clouds above me : clouds all around poor me
Feeling low and weary : Lord I've got a trouble in mind
Everything that gets me : everybody's so unkind
Harvest time's coming : and will catch me unprepared
Haven't made a dollar : bad luck is all I've had
Lord how can I bear it : Lord what will the harvest bring
Putting up all my money : and I isn't got a doggone thing
I'm a weary traveler : roaming around from place to place
If I don't find something : this will end me in disgrace
Ain't got no mother : father left me long ago
I'm just like an orphan : where my folks is I don't know
Blues around my shoulder : blues are all around my head
With my heavy burden : Lord I wished I was dead
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Blue Harvest Blues
Standing on the mountain : far as I can see
Dark clouds above me : clouds all around poor me
Feeling low and weary : Lord I've got a trouble in mind
Everything that gets me : everybody's so unkind
Harvest time's coming : and will catch me unprepared
Haven't made a dollar : bad luck is all I've had
Lord how can I bear it : Lord what will the harvest bring
Putting up all my money : and I isn't got a doggone thing
I'm a weary traveler : roaming around from place to place
If I don't find something : this will end me in disgrace
Ain't got no mother : father left me long ago
I'm just like an orphan : where my folks is I don't know
Blues around my shoulder : blues are all around my head
With my heavy burden : Lord I wished I was dead
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Georgia Blues"- Ethel Waters
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
******
Georgia Blues
(Higgins-Overstreet)
Transcribed from vocals by Ethel Waters, recorded 5/1922.
From Ethel Waters 1921 - 1923, The Chronogical Classics, vol. 796.
I feel bad,
I feel sad,
But it won't be very long
Before I'll be feeling glad,
I just sigh,
I could die;
I have got Georgia blues,
And I'm just too mean to cry;
I don't live in Boston;
I wasn't born in Maine;
If I don't go to Georgia,
I will surely go insane.
I've got the Georgia blues,
'Cause I've got bad news;
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my baby by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
'Cause the train is waiting,
Got no time to lose,
A certain party that I know
Offered me a ticket to Chicago.
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
I've got those Georgia blues,
'Cause I got bad news
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home, home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my sweet daddy by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
My train is waiting
Got no time to lose,
A party wanted to marry me, way last spring,
Even bought me a brand new diamond ring,
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
******
Georgia Blues
(Higgins-Overstreet)
Transcribed from vocals by Ethel Waters, recorded 5/1922.
From Ethel Waters 1921 - 1923, The Chronogical Classics, vol. 796.
I feel bad,
I feel sad,
But it won't be very long
Before I'll be feeling glad,
I just sigh,
I could die;
I have got Georgia blues,
And I'm just too mean to cry;
I don't live in Boston;
I wasn't born in Maine;
If I don't go to Georgia,
I will surely go insane.
I've got the Georgia blues,
'Cause I've got bad news;
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my baby by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
'Cause the train is waiting,
Got no time to lose,
A certain party that I know
Offered me a ticket to Chicago.
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
I've got those Georgia blues,
'Cause I got bad news
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home, home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my sweet daddy by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
My train is waiting
Got no time to lose,
A party wanted to marry me, way last spring,
Even bought me a brand new diamond ring,
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"One Dime Blues"-Blind Lemmon Jefferson
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON ONE DIME BLUES LYRICS
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and aint got a dime,
Everybody gets in hard luck
sometime.
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
Just give'm a six shooter and
highway some passenger train.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON ONE DIME BLUES LYRICS
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and aint got a dime,
Everybody gets in hard luck
sometime.
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
Just give'm a six shooter and
highway some passenger train.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-“War on Terror” Witchhunt-Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist mentioned in this day's (and yesterday's) other posts.
************
Workers Vanguard No. 966
8 October 2010
“War on Terror” Witchhunt
Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
OCTOBER 5—In a series of dawn raids on September 24, FBI agents in Minneapolis and Chicago invaded seven homes and an office of leftists and labor activists. The Feds spent hours ransacking their homes, seizing cell phones and passports and carting away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks. The activists were slapped with subpoenas to testify this month before a witchhunting grand jury. Subpoenas have also been served against individuals in North Carolina and Michigan. The government seeks to pin charges of “material support to terrorism” on the activists and others associated with them based on their political activities in solidarity with the oppressed in the Near East and Latin America. Today, an attorney for the activists announced that all 14 of those hit with subpoenas in the Midwest will refuse to testify before the grand jury in Chicago.
Most of the victims of the raids are well-known leftists. Jessica Sundin is a longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis, a supporter of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and member of the Anti-War Committee, whose office was also raided. Joe Iosbaker is a chief steward and executive board member of Service Employees International Union Local 73 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he acts as an adviser to the Students for a Democratic Society. Mick Kelly is the editor of the FRSO’s newspaper, Fight Back! Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian American antiwar activist, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network.
It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to come to the defense of these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. For decades, the capitalist rulers have sought to tar leftists as “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything. The recent FBI raids open a sinister new front in that effort. Paving the Feds’ way, a June 21 Supreme Court decision expanded what can legally be considered “material support to terrorism” to include a wide range of activities deemed as somehow aiding proscribed foreign organizations.
In a protest letter issued the day after the raids, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, denounced the Feds’ attempt to chill the political activities of those who protest government policies at home and wars abroad. The letter stated: “From its inception under the Bush administration, the ‘war on terror,’ which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures that also target leftists, trade unionists, and black people. Now the Obama administration is escalating these wholesale attacks on civil liberties with these neo-McCarthyite raids.”
The PDC and a number of other organizations have demanded that the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that all belongings seized by the Feds be returned immediately. On September 27, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution condemning the raids, and protest rallies have been held in cities across the country.
Almost to a man, liberal organizations and the reformist left had promoted the illusion that Barack Obama would represent some kind of “change” from the George W. Bush regime. But as we pointed out, what drove Obama’s promises to clean up some of the Bush gang’s most blatant “excesses” was his commitment to wage a more effective “war on terror.” In office, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed down to him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton)—and then some: detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo; domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency; invocation of “state secrets” to quash lawsuits exposing U.S.-sponsored torture; kangaroo-court military commissions to try “terror” suspects; endorsement of indefinite detention, a hallmark of police-state regimes. While Bush broadened the FBI’s legal authority to launch “terrorism” investigations based solely on one’s political views, the Obama government has taken this a big step further with the concerted raids against leftists.
“War on Terror” Targets All of Us
The same day as the FBI raids, the left-wing National Lawyers Guild released a report titled “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” that pointed to “a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties” in the nine years since the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The report denounced the government’s stigmatizing activists as terrorists and its use of “fear-based techniques against those who dare speak out against government policies.”
The purpose of “anti-terror” witchhunts is...to instill terror in the population. The country’s rulers fan fears of constant threat from the likes of Al Qaeda in order to garner popular support for (or acquiescence to) an immense expansion of police powers. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in an amici curiae brief filed in July 2003 on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant”:
“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
It did not take long after the September 11 attacks for the government to demonstrate that its campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism” targeted a much wider swath than immigrants from Islamic countries, not least the labor movement. In December 2001, striking school teachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban. The following year, Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, personally intervened to warn West Coast longshoremen organized by the ILWU that any strike action would be treated as a threat to national security. Even such liberal pacifists as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker group have been spied upon in the “anti-terror” witchhunt, as documented in a report issued last month by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
The SL/PDC amici brief pointed out: “The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents.” The brief continued, “The Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” Taking this “right” to its logical conclusion, the Obama administration earlier this year gave legal authority for the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen living abroad—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of being an Al Qaeda operative and is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
How the “anti-terror” laws and other measures could be used for political witchhunts was on display in the police mobilizations that met protesters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004 and 2008. Civil disobedience and disruptions caused by a few anarchoid youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct”—were now defined as acts of terrorism. In the lead-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), eight protest organizers were arrested on “terrorism” charges. Since then, charges have been dropped against three of the “RNC 8” and another has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While “terrorism” charges have been dropped against the remaining four, they still face trumped-up conspiracy charges that carry with them the threat of years in prison. With the trial for the four due to begin this month, we demand: Drop all charges against the RNC protesters!
While the country’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent, the designation of political opponents as terrorists is a threat of greater magnitude. To be declared a terrorist is to be declared an individual outside of society, for whom democratic rights have no application and who the cops have license to gun down, or disappear, without any purported reason. In the 1960s, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that the Black Panther Party constituted the “greatest threat to national security” gave police nationwide a green light to blow Panthers away. Thirty-eight Black Panther Party members were assassinated in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign and hundreds of others railroaded to prison. Begun in the 1950s, COINTELPRO was vastly expanded under Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark (long a leading light in the Workers World Party’s International Action Center).
Democrats, Republicans Criminalize Dissent
The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s USA Patriot Act. The law proscribes providing money, personnel, services or training to some 40 foreign organizations designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist.
One measure of the threat that “anti-terror” laws pose for the rights of the population as a whole can be seen in the case of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart. Along with her legal assistant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and translator Mohamed Yousry, Stewart was convicted in 2005 of frame-up charges of support to terrorism for her determined legal defense of blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. At stake in Stewart’s case was the very right to legal representation. This July, Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in pressing the courts to vindictively increase her sentence to ten years—a virtual death sentence for a 70-year-old woman who suffers from breast cancer.
The June Supreme Court ruling expanded what constitutes “material support” to include the exercise of the rights of speech and association, which are supposedly protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was in response to a case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and other groups and individuals who wanted to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on how to appeal to the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their struggles. The LTTE and PKK had long been targets of the wars waged by the U.S.-supported Sri Lankan and Turkish governments against the oppressed Tamil and Kurdish national minorities.
The Court’s decision essentially criminalized any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to “terrorists.” This could include anything from donating money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press (see “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July). The secular nationalist LTTE and PKK had made it onto the State Department hit list because they fought a desperate struggle against regimes allied with the U.S.
In ruling against the Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court declared outright: “Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining the United States’ relationships with its allies.” A mere three months later, the Feds launched their attack against leftist activists. Freedom Road, which cheered Obama’s 2008 campaign, is hardly a radical leftist outfit. However, the FRSO and others became targets of government repression on the basis of their support to the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The FARC has been embroiled in a long struggle against Washington’s Colombian puppet regime and its paramilitary death squads, who specialize in killing union activists. Some of the leftists targeted in the FBI raids have been active in the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a political prisoner in the U.S. who, as a leader of the FARC, was tracked down and arrested in Ecuador with the help of U.S. agents.
For the U.S. imperialists, who carry out mass terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a daily basis, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. The last domestic “terrorism” witchhunt, under the Republican Reagan administration, was aimed at mobilizing the population for war against the Soviet Union. We wrote in “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984): “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”
Washington’s terrorist designation has included the Irish Republican Army and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. Included on today’s list are the Basque nationalist ETA, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Real IRA. Although the Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda are currently at the top of the U.S. hit list, when these forces were throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government hailed them as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military intervention in that country had opened the road to the liberation of its horribly oppressed peoples, and particularly women. The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal of troops in 1988-89 allowed the mujahedin cutthroats to eventually take power, after which the likes of Osama bin Laden turned on their former U.S. paymasters.
The Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!
That Obama has stepped up Bush’s attacks on civil liberties should come as no surprise. The Democrats’ posture as the friend of labor and minorities makes them often more effective in carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World as well as Eugene Debs and members of his Socialist Party for their opposition to the interimperialist First World War. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt who interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II and imprisoned 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. His successor, Harry Truman, carried out the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party members in the late 1940s.
Where before the government raised the spectre of communism, today it paints its witchhunt targets as “terrorists” and their supporters. In any case, the point of these campaigns is to strengthen the apparatus of the bourgeois state, which is a machinery of repression and violence against those the capitalists exploit and oppress.
In our fight to build a revolutionary workers party that will act as a tribune of the people, we Marxists are intransigent in our opposition to any infringement on democratic rights. In the mid 1980s, we successfully challenged the FBI’s Domestic Security/Terrorism guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. In announcing our suit against the FBI, we wrote in WV No. 340 (21 October 1983):
“We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!”
As a result of our lawsuit, the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism. The FBI changed its definition of the SL to one that describes what we are—“a Marxist political organization.” Our suit struck a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But, as we wrote when we announced the victory of our suit, “We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government” (“FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
A longstanding low level of class and social struggle has given the rulers a virtually free hand in implementing their attacks on democratic rights and the rights of labor. Bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation are the capitalists’ lieutenants in the labor bureaucracy, who have acceded to wage cuts and union-busting while saluting the imperialists’ “war on terror” in the name of “national unity.”
As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the potential social power and class interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear are secure. The Spartacist League fights to build the vanguard workers party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away murderous capitalist-imperialism and establishes the rule of the working class.
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist mentioned in this day's (and yesterday's) other posts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 966
8 October 2010
“War on Terror” Witchhunt
Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
OCTOBER 5—In a series of dawn raids on September 24, FBI agents in Minneapolis and Chicago invaded seven homes and an office of leftists and labor activists. The Feds spent hours ransacking their homes, seizing cell phones and passports and carting away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks. The activists were slapped with subpoenas to testify this month before a witchhunting grand jury. Subpoenas have also been served against individuals in North Carolina and Michigan. The government seeks to pin charges of “material support to terrorism” on the activists and others associated with them based on their political activities in solidarity with the oppressed in the Near East and Latin America. Today, an attorney for the activists announced that all 14 of those hit with subpoenas in the Midwest will refuse to testify before the grand jury in Chicago.
Most of the victims of the raids are well-known leftists. Jessica Sundin is a longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis, a supporter of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and member of the Anti-War Committee, whose office was also raided. Joe Iosbaker is a chief steward and executive board member of Service Employees International Union Local 73 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he acts as an adviser to the Students for a Democratic Society. Mick Kelly is the editor of the FRSO’s newspaper, Fight Back! Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian American antiwar activist, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network.
It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to come to the defense of these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. For decades, the capitalist rulers have sought to tar leftists as “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything. The recent FBI raids open a sinister new front in that effort. Paving the Feds’ way, a June 21 Supreme Court decision expanded what can legally be considered “material support to terrorism” to include a wide range of activities deemed as somehow aiding proscribed foreign organizations.
In a protest letter issued the day after the raids, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, denounced the Feds’ attempt to chill the political activities of those who protest government policies at home and wars abroad. The letter stated: “From its inception under the Bush administration, the ‘war on terror,’ which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures that also target leftists, trade unionists, and black people. Now the Obama administration is escalating these wholesale attacks on civil liberties with these neo-McCarthyite raids.”
The PDC and a number of other organizations have demanded that the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that all belongings seized by the Feds be returned immediately. On September 27, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution condemning the raids, and protest rallies have been held in cities across the country.
Almost to a man, liberal organizations and the reformist left had promoted the illusion that Barack Obama would represent some kind of “change” from the George W. Bush regime. But as we pointed out, what drove Obama’s promises to clean up some of the Bush gang’s most blatant “excesses” was his commitment to wage a more effective “war on terror.” In office, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed down to him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton)—and then some: detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo; domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency; invocation of “state secrets” to quash lawsuits exposing U.S.-sponsored torture; kangaroo-court military commissions to try “terror” suspects; endorsement of indefinite detention, a hallmark of police-state regimes. While Bush broadened the FBI’s legal authority to launch “terrorism” investigations based solely on one’s political views, the Obama government has taken this a big step further with the concerted raids against leftists.
“War on Terror” Targets All of Us
The same day as the FBI raids, the left-wing National Lawyers Guild released a report titled “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” that pointed to “a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties” in the nine years since the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The report denounced the government’s stigmatizing activists as terrorists and its use of “fear-based techniques against those who dare speak out against government policies.”
The purpose of “anti-terror” witchhunts is...to instill terror in the population. The country’s rulers fan fears of constant threat from the likes of Al Qaeda in order to garner popular support for (or acquiescence to) an immense expansion of police powers. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in an amici curiae brief filed in July 2003 on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant”:
“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
It did not take long after the September 11 attacks for the government to demonstrate that its campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism” targeted a much wider swath than immigrants from Islamic countries, not least the labor movement. In December 2001, striking school teachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban. The following year, Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, personally intervened to warn West Coast longshoremen organized by the ILWU that any strike action would be treated as a threat to national security. Even such liberal pacifists as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker group have been spied upon in the “anti-terror” witchhunt, as documented in a report issued last month by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
The SL/PDC amici brief pointed out: “The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents.” The brief continued, “The Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” Taking this “right” to its logical conclusion, the Obama administration earlier this year gave legal authority for the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen living abroad—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of being an Al Qaeda operative and is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
How the “anti-terror” laws and other measures could be used for political witchhunts was on display in the police mobilizations that met protesters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004 and 2008. Civil disobedience and disruptions caused by a few anarchoid youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct”—were now defined as acts of terrorism. In the lead-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), eight protest organizers were arrested on “terrorism” charges. Since then, charges have been dropped against three of the “RNC 8” and another has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While “terrorism” charges have been dropped against the remaining four, they still face trumped-up conspiracy charges that carry with them the threat of years in prison. With the trial for the four due to begin this month, we demand: Drop all charges against the RNC protesters!
While the country’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent, the designation of political opponents as terrorists is a threat of greater magnitude. To be declared a terrorist is to be declared an individual outside of society, for whom democratic rights have no application and who the cops have license to gun down, or disappear, without any purported reason. In the 1960s, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that the Black Panther Party constituted the “greatest threat to national security” gave police nationwide a green light to blow Panthers away. Thirty-eight Black Panther Party members were assassinated in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign and hundreds of others railroaded to prison. Begun in the 1950s, COINTELPRO was vastly expanded under Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark (long a leading light in the Workers World Party’s International Action Center).
Democrats, Republicans Criminalize Dissent
The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s USA Patriot Act. The law proscribes providing money, personnel, services or training to some 40 foreign organizations designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist.
One measure of the threat that “anti-terror” laws pose for the rights of the population as a whole can be seen in the case of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart. Along with her legal assistant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and translator Mohamed Yousry, Stewart was convicted in 2005 of frame-up charges of support to terrorism for her determined legal defense of blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. At stake in Stewart’s case was the very right to legal representation. This July, Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in pressing the courts to vindictively increase her sentence to ten years—a virtual death sentence for a 70-year-old woman who suffers from breast cancer.
The June Supreme Court ruling expanded what constitutes “material support” to include the exercise of the rights of speech and association, which are supposedly protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was in response to a case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and other groups and individuals who wanted to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on how to appeal to the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their struggles. The LTTE and PKK had long been targets of the wars waged by the U.S.-supported Sri Lankan and Turkish governments against the oppressed Tamil and Kurdish national minorities.
The Court’s decision essentially criminalized any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to “terrorists.” This could include anything from donating money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press (see “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July). The secular nationalist LTTE and PKK had made it onto the State Department hit list because they fought a desperate struggle against regimes allied with the U.S.
In ruling against the Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court declared outright: “Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining the United States’ relationships with its allies.” A mere three months later, the Feds launched their attack against leftist activists. Freedom Road, which cheered Obama’s 2008 campaign, is hardly a radical leftist outfit. However, the FRSO and others became targets of government repression on the basis of their support to the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The FARC has been embroiled in a long struggle against Washington’s Colombian puppet regime and its paramilitary death squads, who specialize in killing union activists. Some of the leftists targeted in the FBI raids have been active in the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a political prisoner in the U.S. who, as a leader of the FARC, was tracked down and arrested in Ecuador with the help of U.S. agents.
For the U.S. imperialists, who carry out mass terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a daily basis, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. The last domestic “terrorism” witchhunt, under the Republican Reagan administration, was aimed at mobilizing the population for war against the Soviet Union. We wrote in “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984): “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”
Washington’s terrorist designation has included the Irish Republican Army and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. Included on today’s list are the Basque nationalist ETA, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Real IRA. Although the Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda are currently at the top of the U.S. hit list, when these forces were throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government hailed them as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military intervention in that country had opened the road to the liberation of its horribly oppressed peoples, and particularly women. The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal of troops in 1988-89 allowed the mujahedin cutthroats to eventually take power, after which the likes of Osama bin Laden turned on their former U.S. paymasters.
The Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!
That Obama has stepped up Bush’s attacks on civil liberties should come as no surprise. The Democrats’ posture as the friend of labor and minorities makes them often more effective in carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World as well as Eugene Debs and members of his Socialist Party for their opposition to the interimperialist First World War. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt who interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II and imprisoned 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. His successor, Harry Truman, carried out the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party members in the late 1940s.
Where before the government raised the spectre of communism, today it paints its witchhunt targets as “terrorists” and their supporters. In any case, the point of these campaigns is to strengthen the apparatus of the bourgeois state, which is a machinery of repression and violence against those the capitalists exploit and oppress.
In our fight to build a revolutionary workers party that will act as a tribune of the people, we Marxists are intransigent in our opposition to any infringement on democratic rights. In the mid 1980s, we successfully challenged the FBI’s Domestic Security/Terrorism guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. In announcing our suit against the FBI, we wrote in WV No. 340 (21 October 1983):
“We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!”
As a result of our lawsuit, the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism. The FBI changed its definition of the SL to one that describes what we are—“a Marxist political organization.” Our suit struck a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But, as we wrote when we announced the victory of our suit, “We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government” (“FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
A longstanding low level of class and social struggle has given the rulers a virtually free hand in implementing their attacks on democratic rights and the rights of labor. Bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation are the capitalists’ lieutenants in the labor bureaucracy, who have acceded to wage cuts and union-busting while saluting the imperialists’ “war on terror” in the name of “national unity.”
As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the potential social power and class interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear are secure. The Spartacist League fights to build the vanguard workers party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away murderous capitalist-imperialism and establishes the rule of the working class.
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